On Being Kidnapped by Methodists

That I don't have a home congregation yet in Durham, or a job in that congregation, or a standing invitation to take over services with liturgical dramas, might surprise anyone who knows the ending to the story that starts with a group of CC freshman looking at each other after Scott's 10:10 seminar and saying, "So...were the rest of you thinking about going to Morning Prayer, too?" (I remember Miriam and Dan; probably Karl had wandered over from Creech's seminar... We were small once.)

Since moving to Durham I've been to three Lutheran churches, the Duke Chapel, a United Methodist church, an Episcopal church, and a synagogue. They are good at welcoming students here. My first Lutheran church, I got a mug and a magnet and my name remembered at the communion rail. I thought that was so cool -- even cool enough to overshadow the fact that just a moment before, I'd realized almost too late that the way communion was going, that usher was going to call upon me to lead my pew up to the head of the sanctuary. (Questions of, "Oh my god, left or right? Kneel? Get up right away? Wait for a blessing?" took on vital existential importance; I rocked, though, in the face of such pressure.) Sam Wells himself said hello to me outside the Duke Chapel; but only because he didn't know who I was. At the synagogue, one of the rabbis recognized me from a guest lecture he'd delivered in our Old Testament class, and I recognized the other rabbi when he stopped into my restaurant the following Monday for a margarita. (I handed it to him in awe and haven't felt such vicarious cool since I communed Martin E. Marty and his bowtie.)

I don't know why I haven't settled. But I can at least report that this morning I checked "Attend Regularly" in the roster at (sorry, you're sitting down for this, right?) the UMC sanctuary I keep wandering into downtown.

It often defies explanation how certain places start to feel like home. I like the stained glass and the bell tower, and the visibility of the children. The only place I've seen a wider variety of willing musicians and instruments is Holden under Jonathan Ruening-Scherer's village musicianship. I've only heard one of the pastors preach, and I could listen to him all day. And maybe best of all, the ushers wear purple "usher" badges, which remind me of the red "usher alert!" flags we stole from the pews in a church we visited one day and brought back to the Fellowship House.

On the other hand, they don't commune often enough, and the young people tried to evangelize me once. A woman announced meaningfully that they met for a Bible Study about once a month after the service at a Mexican restaurant nearby. Caught off guard, I replied that I had a boxer named Floyd. Since we seemed to be sharing personal information...?

There are a few other Divinity students that attend, and one rockstar professor; my closest friends are actually an older couple, Linda and Tom. We sit in the back and quietly perpetuate the rumor that I'm one of their grandchildren. How we met was this: it was my second time at Duke Memorial UMC, and I stood outside, stamping my foot like a child because the service had already started, and suddenly there emerged two people from the building adjacent to the sanctuary. "Hi," I announced, "I'm late; can you tell me which door to go in so not everybody notices?"

They said, "Oh, follow us, we're late all the time." And that was that.

Today they invited me to lunch after church. We went to the old American Tobacco warehouses (they're restaurants and shops and live music venues now), and caught up on siblings and classes and how this winter compares so far with others, and I found out about the guy who performs Mark Twain in Hillsborough, in case I ever have spare time again. They drove me back to the church and a parking lot that was deserted except for my bike chained to the fence, and I realized abruptly that I should have used the bathroom at the restaurant to change from my skirt back into my shorts. Linda and Tom insisted on waiting while I tried every door to every building on the church campus; they were all locked and they all had signs urging me to ring the bell, only I realized that if I rang the bell and anyone actually answered it, I would have to explain that I was just trying to get into the building to change into shorts in a bathroom so I could ride my bike home.

In the quiet of their car in the deserted parking lot, Linda and Tom were having a conversation about how all the doors were probably locked, but I could maybe change out of sight behind the columbarium? Which is exactly what I did, and why (I think) they were laughing when I returned, in shorts, to say good-bye and collect my bike.

I'm not saying I'm Methodist or anything. Yet.

Augustine's CONFESSIONS, Textual Errors in the last two Chadwick reprints thereof

So time is a distension, we know this, and when Augustine writes of reciting a psalm that he knows, he directs his expectation towards the whole and proceeds to make one word, one verse at a time, the object of his memory through the act of recitation, while continuing to hold the rest in expectation. The act extends in two ways, so that Augustine holds in memory the verses he has already recited, and entertains an expectation of the verses he will shortly recite, until the psalm is past and the act is done.

All this is in XI xxviii 38.

Now. If Augustine were to miss a word or a verse during his recitation (he does not posit this as a possibility in XI xxviii 38), it would screw him up: time is distended in two directions, both equally capable of being confounded in the memory. Likewise in any experience of recitation or reading. When a word or a line is skipped, an interruption appears between the reader's past experience of a sentence's beginning and future expectations of the conclusion of the sentence's syntax and thought content, creating in the present a moment for the reader of, "Wait, what the hell?"

On now to the errors in the Chadwick reprints. As far as I can tell, if you have the title of the work backlit in red instead of blue, these are in your book. Depending on your paper topic, it matters.

ERROR #1 -- VIII vii 16

Bottom of page 144, in any edition. Try reading, "If I and you once again placed me in front of myself" and have it make sense. Go on. Or, rather than engage in profitless gymnastics of grammar, consult an older blue copy of THE CONFESSIONS and note that a line has dropped out from the bottom of p144.

Between "If I" on 144 and "and you once again" on 145, pencil in the following: "tried to avert my gaze from myself, his story continued relentlessly," and you'll be fine.

ERROR #2 -- XI xxiv 33

Bottom of page 263, "and I pray that, of" (turn the page) "with utter confidence that in your" -- what? Consulting the blue copy again, there's a line missing at the top of 264. Write in, "your mercy, I may render to you my vows (Ps. 115: 17-18). I say" and keep reading.

Seriously? I thought scribal error was an eighth century thing. But it's alive and well. Now you know.

Meet Floyd

So, abruptly, I've become a dog person.

This is Floyd. He's a boxer. He's a bit of a spazz, but on the whole a good buddy to have around in Durham. Likes long walks and cardboard and meeting new people. And he's picking up on "fetch."

He has a witching hour, around eight o'clock at night. I've noticed, because what do I have better to do than notice Floyd's behavioral patterns -- and also it's hard to miss a 48-lb. boxer tearing back and forth across the apartment floor.

So here's the bizarre thing that makes this a story.

Tonight, the witching hour hits. Floyd is on the loose and digging his nails into the carpet and banging around fit to trouble the neighbors. He sits when I ask him to, and he even stays, but we're only up to ten seconds on that trick. At my wits' end, I call, "Floyd!"

He looks at me.

"Come here!"

He follows me to the bathroom. Pokes his head in the door. I make sure he sees me picking up the toothbrush, applying the toothpaste, yes: brushing. My. Teeth. All this is done with raised eyebrows and a very serious expression.

The dog is now curled up on the bed. Silent as the grave.

A little early, but he'll never know.

Flying into a Triceratops (or, "Nothing´s Gone Wrong Yet")

I don´t know how many people ended up hearing these stories, but I was hit by a car when I was in Paris a little over a year ago, and six months back someone slashed open my handbag on a Metro in Mexico City. I bring it up now because neither of these things discouraged me from traveling and now I´m on my second day in Berlin and wondering why nothing exactly has gone wrong yet.

Paris was a pioneer in Europe´s urban biking phenomenon -- or maybe they weren´t, I don´t really know, but at any rate Paris was the first place I rented a bike for next to nothing. You do need a credit card that they can take €300 from if you fail to reappear with their bike, but apart from that you can tear around the city for €1-7 a day, and return the bike almost anywhere. I had just left the Louvre on mine, and if I remember right I´d come to one of a million side streets off Rue de Rivoli and failed to predict where the hypothetical on-coming traffic (which ended up as real on-coming traffic, which is why there´s a story here) would stop. It did not turn out to be where an American understands the pedestrian cross walk to be located even when it´s not drawn onto the road between the corners. A SmartCar barreled right through to where the driver could see cars (that was his concern, see) were or might be coming. But he knocked me off my bike in the process. In Paris, buildings come right up to the corners of the sidewalks, so neither of us stood a chance. I was fine; a little achy, but none the worse for wear. I ditched the bike off the Champs Elysees and wandered into a theatre to watch the new Indiana Jones movie (it was out at the time) in the shadow of the Arc de Triomphe. Equilibrium slowly restored.

Before I went to Mexico City, I read a lot of the tourist rag, and as a result fully anticipated being robbed at least once. I just wore a leather jacket every day with inside pockets barely big enough for my camera and cash. Not a big deal. I also carried around the handbag I made on the looms at Holden the June that Soul Purpose toured there. It served to carry a journal, a book of Garcia Marquez´short stories, a first aid kit and some ball point pens and granola bars -- and also to keep pickpockets from wondering where else my cash might be. It got promptly slashed on a subway car, my first full day in the city. I felt it happen, pulled my bag away, nothing was taken. Relief and equilibrium flowed in when I found the first aid kit still there in particular, since that´s where I keep the sewing kit and the resolution to the only thing that actually went wrong that trip.

Now I´ve just spent two days in Switzerland, trying to figure out why the McDonald´s advertisements had the outline of a triceratops in french fries or sesame seeds, before I realized it was a rendering of the Swiss borders. With at least three official languages and way-too-clean streets, the country´s like Canada but with a German dismissiveness of America that rivals and compounds the French. I went to the giant toy store off the Banhofstrasse, toured the churches where the Limmatt meets Lake Zurich -- including the Großmünster -- and not a single altar. The chancels sported large and central baptismal fonts (although it took a few for me to figure that out, since they were hiding under huge sprays of flowers (cut for Sunday, brownish now)), and often an ornate lectern or table with an open Bible under pope-mobile plexiglass. Crow´s nest style pulpits. But no altars. When Luther chalked "est" out on the table at Marburg and said a lot was going to ride on how each of them understood that word -- he was right.

A night train took me north to Berlin, and I´m on my second day there. Hiding in a Dunkin´Donuts from the rain at the moment, but nobody´s perfect. Yesterday was the big day of the rent-a-bike, all-Cold War, all-nerd, all-day tour: past Communist monuments and Check Point Charlie and the double rows of cobblestones that mark the old site of the wall down certain streets today. Fat Tire Bike Tours. It´s the way to go, kids.

The only slight oops so far was booking a hostel right over an "Erotik Museum". But the location´s still a good one: I´m right across the road from the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, which is where I spent my morning. Bombed out in World War II and left pretty much as is, in testimony to the horrors of war. The bells are ringing right now, and will be for the next five minutes if my German was worth anything against that sign, as a call to remembrance and reconciliation. (They´ve got a Nagelkreuz, a cross of nails from coventry.) All that´s left of the bombed out church is now a little memorial hall; they talked about restoring it and raising the ruins around it to look, well, like the church always used to look. But that plan got ditched, even though Jacobi (the church´s pastor through the Second World War, and the guy that basically started the emergency German clergy alliance against the German Christianity the Nazis were bringing in with them) was the one behind it. Instead they raised a church next to the ruins that´s like a net of cinderblocks, with tens of thousands of deep blue stained glass panes filling in the gaps all over it, roof to floor. It´s a round nave, with a surprisingly contemporary feel, in contrast to the vaulted arches of the ruins just beyond it.

Rain´s cleared. Good; I have a bit more exploring to do. This time tomorrow, I´ll be in Denmark.

Like Every Other Trip to Valpo

Because in a lot of ways, it was the same. And in some important ways it was different. The Union is up and open and functioning. Heard more good things about this Heckler person I haven´t met yet. And it´s not often asked of me to see a closed casket and understand, "That´s my friend." For example.

But then, on the other hand, I spent a lot of time in the Chapel doing what may have appeared, to the outside observer, as work. Spent an evening at PassTimes. Rode the South Shore Line three times, once to see Isaac´s latest show at Lookingglass, "The Arabian Nights". Ran into friends at random places -- Target (buying socks) or a walk down Lincolnway and up Indiana Avenue. Church at Immanuel, same lovely liturgy, and LBW´s still in the pew racks. Stopped by Ron Rittgers´office eight times when he wasn´t there, but other than that saw and caught up with plenty of former professors. Was asked about future plans a dozen times and gave the same vague reply. But that happens everywhere, not just Valpo.

Last Matins (Somewhat accurate transcript)

Good morning. Um. So I'm Katie, and I've been at Holden for the last ten and a half months -- working as the school's student aide, as worship assistant, and as a cook -- and I leave soon. For, I don't know how long. And I can't tell you how that feels because I've kind of refused to slow down and think about it. I guess I suspect I'll be sad. But there's plenty to do, to keep my mind off things, what with preparing for a move, and wrapping up the work I've done here. I've filled my head, too, with the adventures that are coming next: visiting with family and friends, travel, another move, starting at Divinity School in the fall. I'll turn my own mourning into dancing, thank you.

I'm really smart. But I don't always think things through all the way, so I did something antithetical to this whole enterprise of not thinking about leaving Holden, and not being sad about it. I signed up for Matins, and gave myself the perfect opportunity to think about just how much this place and people have meant to me. But I've figured out how I'm going to do it -- I'm going to read you something from my journal. It doesn't actually take place here; I wrote this while I was sojourning outside the village. But, this is also how I feel about my sojourn here. So.

(Names changed to protect the innocent.)

30 April 2009

So aside from the time I met a Tibetan Buddhist monk at the Seattle Amtrak station, I usually get put next to crazies and lawyers and other undesirables when I travel, and as a rule I think people who talk about meeting people on trains and having "conversations" are fools or liars or just inexperienced. Last evening looked like it might live up to expectations. Hank and Edna are sweet enough, the ride to Seattle and dinner at "Rusty's" passed smoothly -- then they called ahead to make sure I could stay with them at Edna's sister's, and caught on speaker-phone a surly sounding woman with a cancer-stricken cat and an overpronounced sense of that great Kierkegaardian virtue of "infinite resignation." Well, she uttered into Edna's (and my) hearing, it sounds like you've already promised her a bed, so I don't see there's anything else to say.

I had half a mind to beg Hank and Edna to drop me at Sea-Tac after all, where I could sleep sitting up or not at all but at least I wouldn't be in anybody's way, or jockeying with their sick cat for attention.

But then we arrived, and it turns out: you can catch remarkably kind and open and generous people at tremendously unfortunate moods. Expectations can be upset, and narratives rewritten at a stroke. We got out of the truck and immediately toured the yard and ten years' worth of incredible gardening skill, flowers of all kinds and lavender plants and lemon grass stepping all over one another, crowding to the surface. Once inside, I was shown my bed and Susan Boyle's performance on YouTube, and at the dining room table hot breakfast tea and eight kinds of half-finished chip, cracker and crisp bag, and cheese, and paprika-spiced hummus. And we talked and joked about Holden, about teaching, about Florida -- where Edna and her sister and I all grew up. What they call conversation, I guess. Although "conversation," when I hear about it secondhand, always seems a more civilized practice. We moved from observing that the Hank prefers his blue suspenders and come to think of it, blue everything, to Edna suddenly rounding on him with the accusative, "Ya crunchy-eating Yankee."

Substantial to this accusation was the Yankee propensity for salad, as opposed to vegetables steamed or boiled away into a state of semi-permanent flop. I presume. We proceeded to a rousing comparison of Florida's coastal cities and interior, where Hank and Edna have seen washing machines out in the middle of a yard, but running, with the help of a garden hose and an extension cord.

There's nothing quite like people around a dining room table, ill-disposed to rush off and get work done, or to have time to accomplish whatever million things they've set for themselves.

No, nothing quite like it. At all.

For the moments of indecorum, for the first impressions that were absolutely wrong, and the ones that were pretty scarily accurate, thank you. And for the cracks in your clay jars, the thorns in your sides that keep you irritated at yourselves and your neighbors, seething over your oatmeal, wondering how I can talk about this place like the last ten and a half months have been nothing but sunshine when you can't even make it through the morning:

For these things, too, Christ has died.
To raise you to new life, in a new moment, Christ is risen.
To reunite us all someday, Christ will come again.

I'll see you.

Don't worry, kid, I did the same thing...

Another sign of summer at Holden: the past week or so has seen us attempting to mitigate the crushing flow of people through the dining hall at meals by setting up two buffet lines, instead of just one. Things are still pretty hectic. Soon I and much of the inner "winter community" will abandon the project of eating in the dining hall altogether because it will get too crowded. Those days aren't quite here yet, but there's still a certain pressure to navigate the food line efficiently, get your dishes to the dish pit, free up your chair, etc., etc. This is the only excuse with any semblance of adequacy that I can come up with for how I resolved a fierce inner debate about whether to cut in front of a three-year-old girl in the line for lunch.

Now what actually happened was this: mom had the little girl's plate and was moving along, selecting food for the both of them, with Little Sally in tow and periodically peering over the table's edge to contemplate a lettuce bin. Not a huge obstruction; in fact, no more than forty and a bit inches of obstruction, so in the end I resolved the situation by simply reaching over the girl's head for the lettuce tongs.

Except while I was piling up my salad, she backed up and climbed onto my feet.

I thought, Okay.

And then I announced, "All right, we're going to move now." Efficiency, after all. I needed to get in reach of the cucumbers.

Little Sally grasped the edge of the table and walked right along with me, her feet on my feet.

We did this twice before mother looked over and child looked over and child realized she was NOT standing on mum's feet after all.

And you know, part of me felt bad -- because I can remember that day, that instant, looking up and realizing the navy suit pant and the leg inside it I was clinging to was not my father's, but the man my father had engaged in conversation just outside the church. I can remember grabbing a perfect stranger's hand at a theme park and hearing him explain in heavily accented English, "Child, it's not me -- it's not me." I can remember those things because they were jarring. Little brushes with a world I didn't know was out there, where people live and die and go to church and public schools and theme parks and yet unforeseeably, unaccountably aren't in my family. Good heavens.

I have a secret. When you get to be roughly grown-up-size, which I am -- it still happens, you're on the other side, it's hilarious, and you stop feeling bad for terrorizing the young person almost immediately.

Almost.

Image of Early Summer

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

AND ALSO THE WOODS HAS REALLY FREAKING CUTE FAWNS.

It's June at Holden, and the does are giving birth. I spent a few days being unduly mad because everyone was seeing the fawns except me, but in the past few days, I've seen my share. One frisking about mum's legs on the lawn below Lodge 1, puppy-sized and awkward. And two this morning as I ran west -- I had only just passed the wash-out when I came across a doe with two fawns, days old, the pair of them, staring at me from around her knees. A word about my mornings. Yes, I run, and I use the Hart Lake trail, and I pass the foot bridge and Middle Earth and get a few steps up that really unforgiving hill just before the lake itself, and then turn around and jog back to the Village. This takes 90 minutes altogether, and I was really proud of that and figured I was the only person in the world who could do it, until I overheard Mark Schwehn explaining exactly the same running route to Fred Niedner. So I've only lately joined the fit-Valpo-professors club; I was deflated, but maybe I should go back to being proud about this.

I digress. Cute fawns.

This morning I had the luck to come across one when I had my camera with me. She was behaving instinctively: mothers often leave their fawns alone, even for hours at a time, while they go and feed, and in the meanwhile the fawn knows to curl up into a tight little ball and wait quietly in the grass. The goal here is not to attract a bear, who would -- welcome to nature kids -- find an easy helping of protein. The mother always comes back, too, as long as there isn't a crowd of humans blocking her child. Which is why I only took the one photo, and then headed off to Fred's bible study.

Sun Over Buckskin and Full-Contact Sledding

In the dark winter months, Holden only sees direct sunlight after the sun comes out from behind one mountain and before it ducks behind another. I can remember the weeks it spent only an hour traversing low across that sweep of Copper Basin. But today we celebrated seeing the sun climb so high it crested that first mountain -- Buckskin, at 7,756 ft. Mimosas for coffee break. (Unless you're a teacher. I'm still mad about that.)

Later in the afternoon we had a full-contact sledding match, a fierce sport not for the faint of heart. This can be played in a couple of different ways. First, everybody for themselves. Line up a dozen or so occupied sleds at the top of Chalet Hill, count down from three, and suddenly everybody is trying to make it down to where main street hits the bottom of the hill -- and everybody is trying to make sure YOU don't make it down. Sled fronts get shoved to one side and go careening with their occupants into a ditch; two sled pile-ups get hit by an as-yet-unhindered third and somebody goes flying; one person falls off their own sled and tackles another sledder to commandeer their vehicle. Yes, we consider this fun. One of the best kinds. The second way of playing is partners: two people to a sled. One steers, the other flips anybody who gets near them. Again, the object is to make it to the bottom of the hill, and that first, but often there's more honor in screwing up somebody else's day. Third way of playing: line up fewer sleds than there are people, back everyone up twenty feet and add one more level of fun and chaos.

All in all, a satisfying day.

Dragsholm Slot

"August, are you twelve yet?"

"Yes. No. No, not till July."

"Okay, so, one adult, one child, um... Some time over Spring Break." I typed in our information and selected March 2-3 from the electronic calendar. We were on a Danish website, trying to figure out how much it would cost to get a hostel. But not just any Danish hostel. Oh no no. The haunted Danish hostel.

The kids go through cycles on how they like to spend their recess. How much it costs to stay the night in a foreign country is a new one. For several weeks they crowded into the loft in the school library and sang a Vespers service together: the setting from 2007 by Will Chiles. They sang as much as they could remember, and hauled up copies of THE LORD OF THE RINGS and HARRY POTTER Book 7 for "the readings." There have also been recesses spent up at the dining hall playing ping pong and foos-ball (I have never known how to spell that). And read-aloud is another popular activity: I've read them poetry, ghost stories, two-minute mysteries, Roald Dahl's "Boy: Tales of Childhood," and every story book I could find that was illustrated by Edward Gorey or Maurice Sendak.

This morning they took up their research projects: with topics ranging from Castles to Giraffes to Michelangelo to Fairies. (I got in trouble straight away for saying, "Well fairies don't exist, really." I can't believe I've sunk so far.) Castles was the topic that extended into recess. August and I spent class time seeing what books we could order from the region's Public Library (they'll send it to Holden by post, how cool is that?) and had moved on to see if we couldn't find any useful internet sources.

It's GOOGLE'S fault for lighting on a webpage with the name "Haunted Castles."

"Let's see what that's about," we said, almost at once.

The first story we read together was from Dragsholm Slot, a castle in Denmark (Slot = Danish for "castle"). It has three ghosts, apparently, one of them "The White Lady," a young girl bricked into a castle wall by her furious father, which seemed ridiculous and bad until they tried to install modern toilets in 1939 and ripped out a wall and found a skeleton in a white dress.

Loads of stories like this. Come recess, we split an orange and some Goldfish crackers and petitioned for our class field trip to be in Denmark. And as soon as we could we were back in the computer room.

Dragsholm Slot is now a privately owned hotel, and for me to stay there a night would cost about 1600 Danish Kronen (275 USD). Add August, and --

"Two kids."

"Three."

The rest of the elementary school was drifting in behind us, and suddenly we were trying to find out how much it would cost to put five children and myself up in this hotel. I grudgingly added another adult.

Then we went back to reading the ghost stories. Some were gruesome tales of dungeons and spikes and crimes of passion and prisoners gone mad. Then there was the other ghost that haunts Dragsholm Slot, "The Grey Lady," a girl who had been a maid at the castle and still roams the halls, routinely checking if all is in place. Some wanted editing to temper the ghastliness; others to liven things up a bit. But they always know when I'm lying or leaving things out.

"Go back and read it right."

Someone remind me, when I arrive at last in Denmark, searching the churchyards for Kierkegaard's grave, that I promised an eleven-year-old at Holden I would send him a postcard from this haunted castle.

Stop Day (or, "Real Holidays Just Get on my Nerves")

This Thursday past was declared a "stop day" at Holden Village. Stop Days happen every month or so and are precisely what they sound like: no one works. The mavericks don't shovel snow, the kitchen doesn't prepare meals. The only thing we do that remotely resembles our life in community is meet up for prayer early in the evening.

We coordinated this particular stop day because the village population was down to 60 people, almost all of them long-enough-term staff to have a sense of how to fend for themselves come meal time when the kitchen hasn't laid out a buffet. Sixty people, if you need an image, can be fed with fifteen pizzas. It's roughly the size of Valpo's Church Vocations Symposium, only locked away in the mountains.

The rationale behind a stop day is simple: we don't get regular holidays. We're a retreat center. The rest of the world gets a three-day weekend and spends it here, while we take care of the laundry and cleaning the bathroom and getting food on the table. Even the school doesn't get most holidays: when you have to be vacated from your classroom in time for summer Narnia programming to start, you don't build too many days-off-for-the-heck-of-it into your year. No Presidents' Day, no Columbus Day, not even a Martin Luther King, Jr., Day. I go to work, and don't get mail, and the dining hall is crowded. No wonder real holidays make me cranky.

Alas, the school doesn't officially participate in Stop Days, either. Part of that is the business of not too many days-off-for-the-heck-of-it. The other part is that the last thing parents want to hear on Stop Day is they're back in charge of their own children. We compromised this last time around by declaring a half day and taking the elementary school on a hike to Lower Copper Basin. They had a good time of it; stopped to test out the bouncy fallen tree three quarters of the way up, built a fire when we got there, admired the frozen waterfalls in the distance. They didn't exactly go to school, and we didn't exactly turn them over to their parents. Altogether an agreeable holiday.

Story that doesn't end with me punching a mountain lion in the face.

So I decided to try running at Holden. I spent a long time thinking this was impossible, not to mention undesirable, it being winter and cold outside and moreover snowy and icy by turns. But as it happened, I strapped Yak-Trax onto my trainers and did just fine jogging down the road in the direction of Lucerne. I might have gone half a mile. Not much, but it was a beginning.

There are lots of things to think about on a walk (or a jog) in the woods by yourself. At Holden, though, before you get to thinking of any of them, you have to sort out what you're going to do just in case you meet a mountain lion.

Statistically, in this area of the Cascades, there's one such beastie every hundred square miles. That means there's likely one between the Village and Lucerne (there is; I've followed its tracks), another between the Village and Lyman Lake (haven't seen his tracks), and one more between Lyman and Image Lake (followed his tracks for a good long time -- bit unnerving).

The Saturday morning of my run, I did not see a mountain lion. No tracks, either. I did, however, work out that should I see one, my options are (1) look very, very big and loud and scary, (2) go for the knife I'd forgotten to bring (damn), (3) land a well-executed round-house kick, or, the classic defense, (4) punch it in the face. Then it was on to thinking about casting for the spring production.

Since that Saturday, God has remembered it's winter and dropped a few inches of snow on us. But I hope this wasn't my first and last run of the season. If any mountain lions get in on the action in the future, I'll let you know which defense works best.

The Weekend at Holden

I should just have out and done with it: I don't do very much on the weekends. Or rather, I don't get very much done. But this is good, and rather like the concept of "un-schooling" that someone explained to me a while back. (Yes, there is such a thing.) The "un-schooled" don't go to school, nor are they home-schooled: sort of an official form of truancy. Mom might show and tell a bit about math, but there's no set curriculum to be got through. And there's the crux: "because I wasn't doing anything," my friend explained, "I did a lot of things."

So the weekend. I spent Friday afternoon, once school let out, sorting the village's trash in Garbology duty -- a monthly commitment for staff at Holden. Green glass here, brown glass there, pop cans, tin cans, landfill, burnables, compost. Friday was my February day. Other community expectations include attendance at worship (daily), staff meetings (every other week), and weekly dish-team. And of course, whatever your job is. On Saturday I had dish-team, except I forgot. Then I remembered. Just a little late. Well, forty-five minutes late. Well. In the end I went.

I did my laundry. This meant washing it in cold water (we don't have enough hot water to give everyone a shower on any given day, much less to spend on clothes) and hanging it to air dry -- because we don't have enough power for clothes dryers. So think of me when you're taking hot showers and drying your clothes any old time you want. Think of me, too, when you're doing your laundry the day you run out of clean underwear. Air drying takes a bit long for that strategy; gone are such carefree days...

I've been knitting a hat with yarn my mom sent me, so I worked on that. A student taught me to cable, and now I'm making a strap for a bag on another set of needles. This is the pattern:

CO 17 st
R 1, 3, 5, 7: P1, K3, P9, K3, P1
R 2: K1, P3, C6F, K3, P3, K1
R 4: K1, P3, K9, P3, K1
R 6: K1, P3, K3, C6B, P3, K1
R 8: K1, P3, K9, P3, K1
Work Rs 1-8 to desired length.

Used to be gibberish to me, too. Then I moved to Holden.

Watched a movie in Koinonia Fireside Saturday night: LARS AND THE REAL GIRL. Highly, highly recommend it. And I read the last fifty pages of a book I'd set aside months ago, one of Bill Bryson's lovely travelogues.

Decided we'd tackle the imperfect tense in Spanish this week, and set dates for performances of THE COMPLETE WORKS OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE (ABRIDGED) [March 28] and THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST [June 5]. Helped one student memorize lines and received a letter from another with instructions not to open it for a year. I sealed it up and tacked it to my bedroom wall, where I plan on not losing it.

Church happened. (In fact it often does.) Saturday evening we sang Vespers '86, that service I called Holden Evening Prayer until I found out there were multiple settings of Evening Prayer original to Holden, best distinguished by year of composition. Vespers '86 is the one we call Candle Light at Valpo. Then Gather Matins ("pink book," again, in Valpo parlance) on Sunday morning, and mass in the evening, where, yes, yes, what you always suspected is true: "God be with you," is more commonly formulated than "The Lord be with you"; likewise, "Go in peace. Serve the living God!" instead of "Serve the Lord"; and "Creator, Christ and Spirit" instead of Father, Son and same. We use inclusive language in a way that has gotten out of hand in the past, cf. Soul Purpose's experience at the Village time before last. Also we sang ELW 859 instead of ELW 858 for our closing hymn. Both are called "Praise to the Lord, the Almighty," but the version we sang eliminates every other reference to "Lord," "him," "King of creation," etc. Sometimes that makes me sad, because we discard poetry I rather liked and disbelieve our own potential to teach our children prayer without teaching them there's a very large man in the sky. But I rather liked the replacement Sunday night when I found out they'd traded out the line, "Ponder anew what the Almighty can do/ if in his love he befriends you." If in his love he... what? I'd never known what to make of that. Now it's "infinite love here befriends you." So I am mollified.

Everyone is welcome at the table, and when we pray Jesus' prayer, it's not a specific version. The invitation, "Please use the form and words that are closest to your heart," is often heard as preface. I think that's nice. I think it means you could pray in German or Spanish or Greek if you wanted to, but in the end you just hear two English versions unfolding side by side. And like I said, I think it's nice. At Valpo we alternated between "Hallowed be thy" and "Hallowed is your," and I suppose I always had this feeling that change was being foisted upon us -- that we should just stick with the traditional formulation and not force the introduction of this contemporary "Save us from the time of trial" business. Hearing people respond to the "words closest to your heart" invitation with that "other" version was just an experience I needed to have, I guess.

Doctor Who: "Warriors of the Deep" (Ep. 131)

The year: 1984. I was still working on being born, but the venerable British sci-fi series "Doctor Who" was working on a Cold War commentary called "Warriors of the Deep." Here's the NetFlix summary:

With Earth locked in a nuclear stalemate, Dr. Who (Peter Davison) again faces the Silurians and the Sea Devils when the creatures attack an underwater military complex, intent on sparking a devastating war between nations in this four-part story. Meanwhile, enemy spies have infiltrated the base and pose a further threat. Can Dr. Who help the Navy battle the aquatic beasties and unravel a web of intrigue among the ranks of the military?

This is currently my favorite story of Peter Davison's Doctor (the Doctor's fifth regeneration). Not least because the Silurians have a great monster-pet to unleash called the Myrka, in production a cross between a Pantomime Horse and Godzilla. (Very deadly, but only when it can lumber close enough.) The other draw, of course, is that unsubtle "nuclear stalemate" business.

Set in 2084, the tale pits two unnamed power blocs against one another in a general sort of hostility that's gone on far too long, then blows the perspective wide open as a race of aquatic warriors decides man's time of ruling the earth has come to an end. The Silurians ruled the Earth long before humanity evolved, and persist in referring to humans as "ape-descended primitives." It's not clear why or when they went into hibernation at the bottom of the ocean, but they're certainly ready to be done with it. Their strategy? Not genocide, exactly. They move to take over the underwater sea base so that they can launch a proton missile or two and provoke Power Bloc Alpha's human enemy into starting a nuclear war: basically, let the humans kill themselves, then reclaim the earth and restore the Silurian race to its former glory. "And these human beings will die as they have lived," observes the Silurian leader, "in a sea of their own blood."

So that's why we all had that sinking feeling we shouldn't have been building bigger and bigger nuclear weapons, knew there was something we were forgetting... Silurians. Biding their time. Right. Incidentally, everyone in the episode (Silurians, Sea Devils, navy officers -- everyone but the Doctor and his two companions) ends up dead. The last shot is of the Doctor, tired, spent, announcing, "There should have been another way." Nice moral, aaaand -- cut to theme music and end credits!

Like The Butter Battle Book, except complete with sticky end. I love this show.

Letter from a Five-Year-Old

Olaf and I sat down this morning to work on writing. I thought we'd better ease into it. I wrote, "Hello, Olaf!" on his notebook, and he copied, "Hello Olaf" underneath. I wrote a sentence about Mac the Cat, a character whose story we know and love and read together when we feel like practicing that soft "a" sound, and he read it and then copied it underneath. Then he raised himself up a bit and whispered in my ear, "Chris is coming today."

Chris is Olaf's oldest brother, a few years out of college, married, and living outside Holden Village. But, as Olaf astutely pointed out, he's coming to visit today.

Shrewd Teaching Aide that I am, I looked down at Olaf and said, "Would you like to write a letter to Chris?"

So it began.

"Shall we start it, 'Dear Chris'?" I've gotten used to writing with Olaf; he's at a bit of a loss to tell a narrative himself, and often needs prompting to speak in full sentences.

"Yeah," he said.

"Dear Chris," I wrote, reading it aloud as I did.

"I wish I was out."

And I copied this down. He hadn't waited for me to prompt him; he hadn't waited for me to suggest what we might talk about first; he hadn't waited for anything, in fact, except for me to finish writing. And when I finished writing "out," reading aloud as I went along, Olaf said, "You've been out for a year."

So down this went as well. And I just want to point out, that according to this logic, if you're not at Holden, you're just on a really long "out".

"I'm in Kindergarten." He waited for me to catch up. "I'm almost in First Grade." I said it slowly and wrote it down. "You're coming back today." Then, "I forgot what I was doing." And, "I am writing." (No clue.) Long pause.

"Is that all you want to say?" I ventured.

"Yeah."

"How should we sign it? 'From Olaf'? 'Love, Olaf'?"

"Love, Olaf." I wrote it down.

We moved to a table and I got out the triple-lined paper (dotted line in the middle) for him to copy. We went one sentence at a time: I wrote, then he copied. Eventually he noticed that I persisted in ending my lines with a little dot, and he started copying these as well.

"Do you want to draw a picture?"

He did. He sketched in pencil an image of two people, one very much taller than the other: himself and Chris. It was raining in the picture. Chris was holding an umbrella over them.

"Do you want an envelope?"

He did. I showed him how to fold the pages so they would fit, and he asked me to seal it, and to address the front.

"What shall we put, 'To Chris, From Olaf'?" I was back to prompting.

"Yep. You write it."

I did. Until I got to Olaf. "Do you want to write your own name?"

He took the pencil, and I pushed the envelope over to him.

"How do you do 'Saint'?"

Olaf usually writes his name without the Saint, but a pack of J-termers from St. Olaf University had on sweat shirts that apparently taught him this was his full appellation.

"Um, it's an 'S' and then a 't'," I said, not knowing why I should discourage this.

We finished up and drew a stamp, and now we're just waiting for the bus. Olaf is smiling.

The Week at Holden

So I've done my kids the favor of getting them hooked on the current run of "Doctor Who," and they in turn have introduced me to their private obsessions, most notably a young adult series called "Ranger's Apprentice." That one's stuck; I'm still in queue for one of my students to finish Book 5 so I can knock it out in a day and a half. (Remember when books only took that long to read? They still do, if you read the right sort of books.) Just today, the village fifth grader offered me the first volume of "Guardians of GaHoole", a perhaps misguided attempt to extend an olive branch, as the book appears to chronicle the epic journey of some barn owls, but then it turns out the main owl's name is Soren, so, cool.

In other news, P.E. has consisted lately of floor hockey inside the Village Center, which, due to the season, is both unheated and unobstructed by pews. We're that low on power; floor hockey is played in full, bundle-up snow gear. The high school beat the mavericks and have named themselves the FloorLords. There's talk of knitting matching hats and jerseys, and yes, they're capable of that.

We're into China in World Geography, which means I get to spend next week digging out Mencius, Hsun Tzu and Chuang-tze (I'm reading The Tao of Pooh to get myself in the mood). After the triumph of Drama's One Act Night (featuring the last scene of Hamlet and David Ives' WORDS, WORDS, WORDS), I've got the kids working on Duet Monologues while I privately debate the feasibility of mounting two productions before I leave the Village: in the running are THE COMPLETE WORKS OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE (ABRIDGED), Oscar Wilde's THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST, and a heavily edited version of Stephen Adly Guirgis' THE LAST DAYS OF JUDAS ISCARIOT.

I also have more books checked out on my public library card for students than for myself, and when a student correctly identified person and number for a preterite verb in Spanish class I almost teared up.

We still can't use clothes dryers (not enough hydro-electric power to fuel them AND the dish washer AND the lights in Koinonia AND...). There's been no new snow in four days. The sun is out a little longer and a little longer each morning, and I've taken to spending those hours barefoot -- whether inside or, occasionally, out on the thirty inches of snow we do have. I'm not sure you can predict how that feels except you try it.

What did YOU do today...?

Today I broke out a new kind of paper for the village five year old I've been helping teach how to read and write. Special, special three-lined paper: a bold line at the top, a bold line at the bottom, and a dotted line in the middle to show you where the tops of your a's go.

(I love my job.)